creator Xu, Qian advisor Cinar, Ali Diabetes is one of the prevalent diseases in the USA, which affects the lives of millions of people. In 2010 only, there was a total of 234,051 deaths linked to diabetes in the USA. Research related to preclinical and clinical assays are always costly and time consuming. Modeling is a helpful method to reduce the cost of clinical experiments and accelerates the discovery and improvement of new therapies. This research is focused on the development of a high performance agent-based model simulating the pathogenesis of Type 1 diabetes mellitus in pancreas. The whole immune response takes place in three compartments, pancreatic lymph node, circulation, and pancreas. A significant part of the complex interactions leading to Type 1 diabetes takes place in the pancreatic tissue. Therefore, the focus was placed on the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, and the interaction of CD8+ T cells and Beta cells were modeled. T cell behavior was incorporated as rules in this model such as activation, migration, proliferation, apoptosis, and cytotoxicity. Likewise Beta cell death and regeneration under the T cell attack were modeled. The model is able to capture the trends of T cell and Beta cell variations during the disease progression and portrays the role of CD8+ T cells in the process. It is expected that, with the addition of other immune system and pancreatic tissue components, the model will be a valuable tool for the planning of clinical studies. Submitted by Erma Thomas (thomase@iit.edu) on 2017-05-15T18:58:18Z No. of bitstreams: 1 etdadmin_upload_471253.zip: 1398838 bytes, checksum: 7ade5683b9cee85b13aeee0916f31c74 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-15T18:58:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 etdadmin_upload_471253.zip: 1398838 bytes, checksum: 7ade5683b9cee85b13aeee0916f31c74 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-12 M.S. in Biomedical Engineering, December 2016 2016 2016-12 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/4031 en Agent-based Modelling Basement membrane Beta cells CD8+ T cells Type 1 Diabetes Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access BME / Biomedical Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department